Entertainment Blogs

An online journal about visual art, the urban landscape and design. Mary Louise Schumacher, the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic, leads the discussion and a community of writers contribute to the dialogue.

REVIEW: Tomas Vu-Daniel at RedLine Milwaukee

Like windows onto an expanse of debris-filled outer space or perhaps portals into an unreachable fathom of dark sea teeming with strange, light-deprived creatures, a series of paintings by Tomas Vu-Daniel seem to contain hostile landscapes.

Our powers of interpretation are set into motion instantly as we’re confronted by dense tangles of familiar forms and lines in the mostly darkly colored works. Things our eyes are used to seeing or deciphering – maps, diagrams, schematics, space ships, forests, pathogens, computer-generated globes – are layered, combined, stretched like taffy and re-combined.

The result is total break down. With the everyday visual language we use to read weather maps in the newspaper or to assemble toys at Christmas, Vu-Daniel creates post apocalyptic worlds of ambiguous scale, where technology and organic material seem to replicate like viruses.

Vu-Daniel layers silkscreen, paint, drawing and collage into the works, further complicating the displaced spatial relationships with complex physical textures. What’s unsettling is how sumptuous these spaces, utterly foreign and devoid of humanity, can be.

Vu-Daniel is a native of Saigon, Vietnam and is a working artist in New York. His experience of he Vietnam war as a child and living in New York at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks have influenced his work and his exploration of disaster and collapse.

The exhibit of Vu-Daniel’s work, titled “Flatland,” closes after Friday at RedLine Milwaukee, 1422 N. 4th St. It is the inaugural exhibit for RedLine, a new urban art center featuring education programs and an artist residency. The quality of this show bodes well for the level of ambition for this newcomer. For more information: (414) 491-0088.

About Mary Louise Schumacher

Mary Louise Schumacher is the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic. She writes about culture, design, the urban landscape and Milwaukee's creative community. Art City is her award-winning cultural page and a community of more than 20 contributing writers and artists.

E-mail Newsletter

Keep up with the art scene and trends in urban design with art and architecture critic Mary Louise Schumacher. Every week, you'll get the latest reviews, musings on architecture and her picks for what to do on the weekends.